HOW WE ROBBED A STORE
Shortly after midnight I took up my position in an alley in the rear of the store to stand guard while Ned and George removed a pane of glass from a cellar window. Through this opening the men squeezed, and presently the dim reflection of their dark lanterns showed me that they had safely reached the store above.
I had been standing there in the rain for nearly twenty minutes when a low rumble from inside the store made me prick up my ears. Just as I was puckering my lips to whistle a shrill warning to my comrades I saw them appear at the back door of the store carrying between them a small iron safe. It was this safe rolling over the floor which I had heard.
The safe was a small affair, but so well made that it had successfully resisted all their efforts to drill it open. Finding it was not too heavy to be carried they had decided to take it outside the town, where they could blow it open without fear of arousing the sleeping village.
We must have made a strange procession as we trudged along through the darkness—the two men partly carrying and partly rolling the safe along, and all of us wading through mud half way to our knees.
At last we reached a meadow far enough removed from any houses for our purpose. George Mason filled one of the holes he had drilled with black powder and wrapped the safe with some old sacks to protect the fuse from the wet and also to muffle the noise of the explosion.
Ned touched a match to the fuse and we scurried to a safe distance. The charge went off with a dull boom—the shattered door of the safe flew high into the air and landed several yards away.
Waiting a few minutes to make sure that no one in the village had been awakened, we hurried back to get our plunder. There were $350 in cash, a diamond ring, some gold pens, and fifteen or twenty dollars' worth of postage stamps. With the few dollars the boys had taken from the till this made a trifle more than four hundred dollars for our night's work—a pitifully small sum compared with what some of our bank robberies brought us, but enough to support us until we could plan some more ambitious undertaking.
Just as we were dividing our plunder into three equal shares a freight train whistled in the distance.
"George and I will jump on this train," said my husband, giving me a hurried kiss. "It's safer than for the three of us to stick together. Good-bye—and take care of yourself. We'll meet you in South Windham, Conn., late to-night or early to-morrow."
Wet, bedraggled, and so tired that I could have fallen asleep standing up, I groped my way to the railroad station and curled myself up on a bench to snatch what rest I could. Just before daybreak a milk train came along. I boarded this and traveled by a roundabout route to South Windham.